


Hold me I am broken; hold on so are you

by crayyyonn



Category: KAT-TUN (Band)
Genre: Gen, i dunno, implied past jinkame, look kame makes me very happy but then very sad also, written in 2012 i found it in the dregs of my tumblr
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-08
Updated: 2017-03-08
Packaged: 2018-09-30 19:42:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10170377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crayyyonn/pseuds/crayyyonn
Summary: Everyone sees the glamorous shell, but no one ever takes the time to pry it open to get to the soft insides. Kamenashi is used to that.





	

Everyone sees the glamorous shell, but no one ever takes the time to pry it open to get to the soft insides. Kamenashi is used to that. He is used to being seen as a pretty flower, neatly placed in a beautiful vase, a slab of meat, salivated over, and sometimes the butt of friendly jokes on television with personalities who absolutely know better. After all, he is _Kamenashi Kazuya_.  
  
He is used to it. He even helps it along, most of the time. During the day, he dredges up the mantle of frostiness, chants the mantra of superiority, staying unapproachable and keeping people at bay. He struts, eyes hidden behind dark shades, gaze resting on the mere mortals for not more than a few seconds before sliding away. He sticks his hands in his pockets and purses his lips in a pout, valiantly ignoring the flashes of light and discreet clicking of shutters. He is Kamenashi Kazuya. He is Kame, Kame-chan, Kazu-chan, even Kazuko… any number of names they come up with for him. It all slides off him like water, during the day.  
  
At night, though… at night he is Just Kazuya. He strips himself to the bone in his cold, vast apartment. He stands under the blistering hot shower and sits in the tub till the water cools and the bubbles disappear. He pads around the kitchen, cooks for two but sets the table for one. He watches the TV on mute, not wanting the raucous laughter to fill up the empty space he didn’t know he had. He curls up in bed on his side, knees tucked into chest, blinking wide eyes at the projected constellations for hours, brain running on overdrive.  
  
Uchi once said he didn’t have any friends in private, outside of Johnnys. At the time, it sparked an indignant uproar, but it’s the sad, fucking truth. He hasn’t changed much since those first years in the entertainment industry, when he had dragged a huge stuffed bear onstage to read a letter to because he didn’t have anyone he could ask. Sure he had been mobbed later by juniors and peers and even seniors clamoring to be his friends, but it’s mere child’s play to see through it for what it truly was; he was Kamenashi Kazuya, newbie going places, the person in Johnny’s pocket everyone needed to please. And more than a decade later, it’s still the same. He’s still Kamenashi Kazuya, public commodity hot as fuck, media darling, and all round all-Japanese guy who’s a baseball-loving sometimes-dork who goes starstruck just like any other person. Relatable, reliable, real.  
  
Not that he thinks he’s not loved. He is, he knows he is. He knows this from the screaming girls, the paparazzi who follow him around, the juniors who look up to him and speak to him with deferential respect, the seniors who call him up out of the blue to ask how’s it going. He knows it the way the rest of Kat-tun, his band, his pseudo-family, knows when to give him space or to prod him out when he’s sunk too deeply into himself, when to cheer him on or when to take him down a peg or two. He knows all this, but above all he knows better than anyone that while it is here now it is fleeting, it will not last, it _cannot_ , and he builds walls around his heart brick by brick every second in preparation for the day when everyone leaves and never comes back. Oh it’s not because he thinks he’s not worthy of love, he is, he knows he is, but love in its nature, no matter the strength, is fickle anyway.  
  
Like his namesake, he carries around a shell on his back, unbreachable, hard as nails, because god forbid anyone sees that he is flesh and bone underneath. He crawls out from underneath sometimes, just enough, giving off a glimpse of the soft underbelly, showing how he really is only human; he makes mistakes just like any other, he loves and hates and dreams and hopes, and then he pulls back before anyone else can slip inside with him, where his defenses are down, where he has none to speak of. It had happened once, he had let down his guard, and look how that turned out. Never again, he promises himself. Not on his life.  
  
But if he’s honest with himself, that person is still there, inside his shell, inside his skin, melted into his bones, coursing through his blood. His friend, his rival, his lover, his kin… what he feels for him extends even beyond the bonds of kinship but deeper, deeper, deeper than the pseudo-relationship they had for almost eleven years, longer than the two and a half decades he’d lived, so far back in the past it meets the future and hints at forever. Huh, forever. A laughable concept, there’s no such thing; everything in life comes with an expiry date, but somehow, some way, he knows they’ve met before and they will meet again and this, this _thing_ between them, it is cursed to never end.  
  
And he hates it, _hates it_. The love of his life, his lives, the person he knows inside out but will never truly understand, the one who makes him feel emotions he doesn’t think there are words for yet. Another woman’s husband, another woman’s man, and that ring on his finger mocks him as it glints, burnished gold as ostentatious as it is sedate. See, he did say love was fickle, did he not? He is another woman’s man, the father of her child, the bread winner, the provider, the written off, the betrayer, the one he desperately, desperately wants to forget, and Kamenashi despairs.  
  
So, some nights, he cries. He cries because he feels lonely, because he always has. He cries for a love lost, a love he’ll always have. He cries for memories from his past, memories he wants of the future but never will. He cries huge, gulping sobs that shatters the silence like a stone shatters glass. He cries little whimpers at the end when he’s too tired and fills his lungs in tinny whines. He cries till his pillow soaks and his eyes swell and his nose blocks and his head hurts. He cries till he has no tears left and then he cries himself to sleep.  
  
And then the next morning, just as every other, he gets up, dresses as carefully as he knows how, slipping on hats and shades and bracelets and rings like they are fragments of an intricate armor and they are, they are. He checks for chinks in the mirror before sliding his shell in place, and just like that he is Kamenashi Kazuya, invincible, untouchable, loved (for the moment), and he is ready, more than ready, to take on yet another day.


End file.
